


1000 Ways to Kill a Cat

by kvikindi



Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: Allusions to abuse, Episode: s04e01 The Dead of Winter, Gen, Graphic Description of Corpses, Monty the cat, Nightmares, No Actual Cat-Killing Occurs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-13
Updated: 2016-08-13
Packaged: 2018-08-08 10:59:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7755088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kvikindi/pseuds/kvikindi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of the Crevecoeur murders, Hathaway struggles to find his footing. And babysits a cat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1000 Ways to Kill a Cat

**Author's Note:**

> Obviously what the world needed was another post-"Dead of Winter" fic.

_ Exile or pilgrim set me once more upon that ground: my rich and desolate childhood. _

Geoffrey Hill, _Mercian Hymns_

 

* * *

**1.**

A secure hospital’s not so different to a prison, when you get down to it, and Zelinsky goes away for the rest of his life, so God is good and the courts are good and the Thames Valley is fragrant with justice. All of this at least for a little while.

* * *

**2.**

Hathaway is put on leave for four weeks, “and you’re lucky it’s not longer.” Officially this is because of injury. Unofficially, of course, it’s punishment.

“Consequences,” Innocent corrects him. “Actions have consequences, James. You can’t just do whatever you want; there are consequences to it. Lewis might let you get away with it, but I can’t afford to.”

Hathaway is in no position to protest. He goes out to his car and drives away from the station. He doesn’t care where he’s going, and when he stops he only vaguely remembers where he’s been. The fields around him are green. That English peridot colour. That very, very fresh, very wet, very young spring green. The hedges are darker, netted with brambles. Sheep stare at him over fence rails like old ship timbers. He sits with the car door open and lights a cigarette.

After a while he goes and sits on the fence, dangling his long legs over. The sheep crowd up around him, not at all cautious, just curious about his nature. He holds out his hand and they whuffle at it: aggressive with their velvety noses. He lets them become comfortable with his scent, as though he were just any other animal, just a part of the indifferent landscape.

* * *

**3.**

The Mortmaignes will lose Crevecoeur, are in negotiations to do so genteelly and with the aid of the National Trust. The heavy doors will close and when they open again they will be restored, but not too restored, not too much, because what the public want is a little wear and tear, some damage. Proof that people lived here once, on the other side of the national border that separates the past from us.

Tourists will come in busloads with iPhones and cameras. They will walk the green green rounds of the maze and the slope down to the summer house. A previous generation of Mortmaignes had planned a wildlife park there, replacing perhaps the lake and the folly, perhaps the maze and the summer house themselves. That plan never came to fruition. The only wildlife tourists will see are the tatty rugs, taxidermied lions from Kenya, a pheasant here and there, a well-preserved fox. Elegant animals and native to Oxfordshire, for the most part.

Perhaps the stables will host a cafe and gift shop. There will be the usual plastic swords and scented candles, books about the Civil War; for £1.50 you can buy a postcard of the Hall or the chapel. You can buy a map of the maze to study as you drink your coffee, as you scrape your scone with cheap packets of cream and jam; children can trace its routes in crayon. Laid out like that it’s simple, a cereal-box game. They will find all the exits and grow bored quickly and want to run out to play in the sun again.

* * *

**4.**

Lewis has been coming round ever since Hathaway got put on leave. He keeps bringing Hathaway things. Whiskey, DVDs, tikka masala, a plate of biscuits his neighbour baked, a book Laura Hobson recommended. The DVDs are baffling: BBC documentaries on Milton and Dickens and Betjeman, hosted by comedians Hathaway’s never heard of. This must be what Lewis thinks he’s interested in. He watches them with Lewis. They sit on either side of the sofa. Lewis always sits very far away.

Hathaway finally pauses in the midst of a film about W.H. Auden. Without looking away from the screen, he says, “Why are you doing this?”

Lewis has chopsticks halfway to his mouth. He puts down the bit of garlic chicken and shrugs. “Seemed like something to do. Nothing more to it than that.”

“Whatever you’re thinking, I’m not—“ He sets his teeth. After a moment  he takes the DVD off pause. “You could at least bring something you like watching,” he says. “It would be less obvious.”

Next time, Lewis brings the 1966 World Cup Final. Hathaway doesn’t comment, just gets up and finds a packet of Jaffa cakes in the cupboard. He offers one to Lewis. “To go with the whiskey,” he says, and folds himself up on the sofa, arm around his knees.

“Cheers,” Lewis says.

On the television, images flicker from before Hathaway was born, when the world wasn’t black-and-white but was still somehow simpler. How old was Lewis in 1966? Thirteen, fourteen? He was kicking a ball down the street. He was getting a cricket bat for Christmas. He was learning to fish out at Whitley Bay. He was doing all the things that boys are supposed to do. He was growing up. Inch by inch.

* * *

**5.**

Hathaway’s flat is notable for an absence of photos. Other people own photos in which he appears. Perhaps there are even some on the Internet, where everyone puts their photos these days. #tbt Cambridge, 1998, this gawky nineteen-year-old rower, squinting at the sun, all elbows and legs. #tbt Illchester, 1996, the same boy but skinnier now, hunching his shoulders, his fringe falling in his face. #tbt WOMAD 2004, an older Hathaway, visibly uncomfortable with an arm around his shoulders, clutching his guitar, surrounded by— perhaps his bandmates? Or is that Will and Feardorcha, in the back of the photo?

Does Nell keep photos? No; Nell’s not sentimental. But in the closets of her father’s dreary little semi-detached house in Allbridge, there are stacks of cloth-bound albums she doesn’t look at, won’t have cause to look at yet for many years. They are put together badly, as though their maker had once seen a family album and thought, Ah, I see, I’m supposed to do that— without understanding the logic behind it. Photos are stuffed in at random, unlabelled, undated, sometimes with gaps of years separating one from the next: here is the child James, fitted with spectacles already, looking on with baffled disdain as the infant Nell is presented to him; here the toddler James with a picture book in his lap, a smear of chocolate on his camera-startled face; here James poses on the Crevecoeur Hall steps with weedy Paul Hopkiss and little Lady Scarlett Mortmaigne; here James takes his first Communion, scrubbed-clean and suit-stifled; here, on a family holiday, is teenaged James, scowling and shoving his thick specs up his nose.

The Mortmaigne Christmas party, 1987. The Mortmaigne Christmas party, 1989. Everyone posed, formal and smiling. A big happy family on the estate. #tbt James and Paul firing cap pistols at one another in the garden. #tbt James and Scarlett in fancy dress. Why? No one remembers. A party of some sort. He was a sad little Harlequin, and she, of course, was a fairy princess.

James and Paul, dressed up. A piano recital? Yes, there’s James at the piano, with his feet dangling off the bench. A look of fierce concentration. He learnt by ear at first. And here’s Scarlett on horseback, James posed next to the horse, touching its side, his head tilted slightly towards it, as though he is listening, hoping it will tell him some secret. He is small for his age, not yet into his growth, but already there is something remote about him, as though he has turned his eyes towards other worlds, avoiding this one, as though he has decided his body is not where he wants to live.

* * *

**6.**

Once Lewis shows up at Hathaway’s with a pet carrier containing an enormous tabby cat.

“He belonged to Stephen Black,” Lewis says. “His name is Monty.”

“He’s not staying here,” Hathaway says.

“Just for a few days,” Lewis says. “I’m off to Manchester for the weekend.”

The cat, once released, immediately thuds onto the coffee table and attempts to eat a half-smoked cigarette. When Hathaway removes the ashtray to a higher location, the cat stares unreadably at him before reaching out and knocking a wine glass onto the rug.

Over the course of the next three days, the cat breaks a guitar string, spills a gallon of milk, leaves a six-inch scratch down Hathaway’s leg, chews on an Edward Thomas first edition, vomits on Hathaway’s Thames Valley Police 5K t-shirt, and chooses to sleep in the exact center of the bed, so that Hathaway eventually gives up and moves to the sofa.

On Saturday night the cat wakes him with its snoring. Hathaway listens to the in and out of its breath, wheezy with a hint of purr underneath. He hasn’t slept with another person in the room for years. The thing with Fiona hadn’t been like that. A cat’s not a person, but it's another living thing. Something that lives and breathes and wants affection.

He has to sit up, put his head beneath his knees so he doesn’t panic. He doesn’t go back to sleep after that.

In the morning he stands looking at the cat sprawled on his bed. He touches it hesitantly: the dark short hair soft under his fingers. It bats his hand away with a splayed paw and bites his wrist.

“All right,” Hathaway says, wounded. “You’ve made your point.”

He doesn’t try to do it again. After that they get along better.

When Lewis comes back, the cat runs to the door and rubs itself against his legs. “How did it go?” Lewis asks, scooping it up and making faces at it.

Hathaway says, “Field Marshal Montgomery and I have reached an impasse.”

Lewis makes a different face, this time at Hathaway. “Well,” he says, “that’s better than I feared.”

* * *

**7.**

Then with the cat gone the flat feels different. On Sunday night the silence wakes him, and for a moment Hathaway is absolutely certain the cat is gone because he killed it, because he didn’t feed it, because he wasn’t careful, because he let it escape.

He sits up. Puts his head between his knees. Doesn’t panic.

A cat could die from getting a window open and tumbling three stories. A cat could die from getting into his cigarettes. A cat could die from not being fed and not being given water. A cat could die from some bit of glass left snagged in a fibre of carpet from the last time Hathaway broke a cup or a dish. A cat could die from electrocution. There are a thousand ways to kill a cat. How could a person ever keep on not killing a cat and still have time for other things, other thoughts?

He wanders from the bedroom, props a window open. Lies down on the sofa, feet lifted up onto the arm. He smokes a cigarette and listens as night progresses with slow and steady footsteps towards dawn.

* * *

**8.**

Trials go on a long time. Not the trials themselves, not the part that involves actually sitting in court, but the time beforehand when the trial’s gestating. Evidence is catalogued. Statements are taken. Paperwork is filed. Testimony’s practiced. Lawyers assemble the body of a case. It is a lumbering and giant thing, not quite alive yet. But not quite not-alive either.

It lives inside Lewis’s office after Hathaway returns from leave. It sits in the corner. This trial that is waiting to be born. They’re both aware of it. Phones ring and the air goes dead and the thing in the corner wakens.

“You won’t have to appear,“ Lewis says one afternoon when the atmosphere is exceptionally silent and he’s just rung off with one-or-another lawyer. Then, when Hathaway looks at him: “You _shouldn’t_ have to.”

“Paul’s solicitor asked me to,” Hathaway says. “To talk about him, to talk about what it was like. Growing up. There.”

“They’ll ask why you didn’t tell me,” Lewis says. “Why you didn’t tell anyone.”

He says _anyone_ the second time, but he still means _me._ He means _why you didn’t tell me._ He means: why didn’t you tell me?

“I know,” Hathaway says. “I know, I can’t.”

“He was going to kill you,” Lewis says. Gently; let it be known for the record, my lord, that the whole exchange is gentle. We don’t want to anger the animal in the corner too much. “Because you knew. He was probably planning it almost as soon as you showed up.”

“I _know_ ,” Hathaway says. He shoves a drawer back into his desk.

“I just mean that you shouldn’t feel…” His voice trails off. He doesn’t finish the sentence.

“No, please,” Hathaway says. “Tell me what I shouldn’t feel.”

* * *

**9.**

That night when Lewis shows up Hathaway has his own DVD ready: _Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid._ Hathaway gets up sometime before the last gunfight and heads into the kitchen. He listens at a remove as Butch and Sundance go down together.

— _Is that what you call giving cover?_

_—Is that what you call running?_

Sundance with his seraphic hair.

Lewis comes into the kitchen as the credits are rolling. He doesn’t comment on the bottle of whiskey. He sits at the table. At the tail end of a long silence, he says, “I seem to remember you telling me most people have unhappy childhoods, but they don’t all—“

“You didn’t know him,” Hathaway says.

“No.” An echo of their former conversation.

“Do you think it makes me a better person? That I didn’t... Do you think that says something about me?”

Lewis moves the bottle away as Hathaway reaches for it.

“I don’t think it does,” Hathaway says. “I don’t think it says anything at all.”

Lewis says, “You can’t think about it like that.”

“Then I don’t know how to think about it. Maybe you could tell me.” Hathaway peers at him, hostile and half-drunk, or perhaps not so hostile, perhaps simply urgent for an answer. His hand is clutched around his glass.

Lewis gives him a long, tired, unreadable look. “I think you should get some sleep,” he says. “You haven’t been sleeping well, have you?”

* * *

**10.**

Since returning to Crevecoeur, Hathaway’s had recurring dreams about his childhood, and other dreams that attempt to masquerade as dreams that are not about his childhood, though in fact they are.

He dreams that he is burying the skin of a lion in the Lodge Farm garden.

He dreams he is playing a piano and the keys come off in his hands, the way that nails come off a corpse that’s been dead for weeks.

He dreams he is a child at Lodge Farm, and there is a door in the wall of his bedroom, and he finds the body of a child when he opens it: desiccated, like Linda Grahame’s body, its skin very dry and paper-thin.

He dreams he is climbing up the slope from the summer house, but the lawn has flooded and the flood is full of fish, beautiful fish, flashing and silver and iridescent, silent in the green waters all around him. The flood is his fault; he opened a door, left a latch loose, pulled a plug that he wasn’t supposed to pull. And he was wrong: the fish aren’t fish; they are the bodies of children, lapped by the shallow water. Their lips are blue and their eyes are opaque with death.

He dreams that he gets to a music festival and finds that his guitar is missing. He drives back to Oxford, searching for it, sick with dread and guilt and a sense he is too late. When he arrives at his flat, he opens the guitar case and finds the body of Anna Rosenbaum there, the girl Zelinsky killed. How could he have forgotten? How could he have forgotten where she was? How could he have forgotten and left her there?

He dreams that he is the child at Lodge Farm, hiding in the wall, and someone is immuring him brick by brick. He tries to scream, but his mouth is gone. He has been in the wall a long time. He looks down at his hands. They are skeletal. Outside, another brick is chunked into place. Someone is humming. A beautiful tune. Something that James used to play on the piano.

He dreams that Paul Hopkiss is sitting in the corner of his bedroom— not Paul Hopkiss as he is, but Paul Hopkiss as he was, an undersized child with wide dark eyes that always looked too big for his head, and clothes he could never keep the grass stains off of. He doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t make a sound. He doesn’t take his eyes off James. He just sits.

* * *

**11.**

The press loves trials, particularly aristocratic trials. Now: how to choose from such an _embarras de riches_ as is set before them in June _?_ A paedophile marquess, his jetsetting daughter, the child victim turned butler turned murderer-for-love… Though Augustus Mortmaigne, Marquess Tygan, isn’t contesting the charges. A little less fodder for the papers: no witnesses. Very sad. Their attention will turn to his daughter, the scandalous heiress, with her annulled marriage, her love of fast cars, her holidays in Montenegro and the south of France.

Paul Hopkiss— alas!— isn’t much of a character. It might have been exciting to dig up a little melodrama: a life ruined by the aristocracy’s corruption, a promising career, a love gone bad. But in fact there isn’t simply isn’t much to Paul Hopkiss. He is bland, pitiable, underachieving. He lived at Crevecoeur all his life. He wrote letters to his mother. He rarely spoke to other people— well, can you blame him?

The obvious tabloid angle is _MARQUESS’ DAUGHTER AND BUTLER IN MURDER SEX PLOT?_ But no one who has seen Paul Hopkiss would believe this. It is impossible to imagine him falling in love, or anyone falling in love with him. All the love has been sucked out of his body. There is something vaguely used-up about him.

Who will speak for this boy who cannot speak for himself? Who spoke little as a child, and then, after not so very long, could not get a word out without st-st-st-st-stammering, so that perhaps, they thought, it was something he’d been born with…?

Who will tell the court about the elaborate battles enacted by James Hathaway and Paul in Wytham Woods? Sometimes Cavaliers and Roundheads, sometimes American outlaws, sometimes Vikings and Anglo-Saxons, but always filled with gleeful war cries as creative as any that ancient forest had heard. And always meticulously detailed: _You can’t have a broadsword; they didn’t use broadswords! They used rapiers and muskets, and if you want a musket, you’ll have to pretend to load it! It took ages!_ That would be James, mysteriously clever, starting the sort of conversation that tended to end with him getting hit with a very large stick. (Paul had learned to communicate his points without words.)

Who will tell the court about the simple language of gesture James and Paul devised for when Paul got too frustrated by stammering, or the inevitably rude uses of this language— often, though not exclusively, in church… ? Or the long conversations about God, studded with odd lacunae, sometimes what you would refer to as ellipses, where something they didn’t speak of had been excised. _How big is God’s brain, if he keeps track of every sparrow?_ Paul would want to know, and James would begin to answer with a lecture on Neoplatonism _,_ until Paul poked him and said to stop showing off, and James asked, _Does it make you jealous_? But Paul wasn’t ever jealous.

Or if he was, he never said anything about it.

* * *

**12.**

Lewis brings the cat back at the end of the summer. “Laura and me’ve finally managed to run off to the opera. Seems a shame to board him when you got along so well,” he says.

Hathaway eyes him with resignation. “This is part of some sinister plan,” he accuses.

“No sinister plan. Promise. Just a cat.” Lewis opens the gate of the pet carrier and coaxes Monty out. Monty bumps his head against Lewis’s hand, then turns a disdainful stare on Hathaway.

“That cat hates me,” Hathaway says.

Lewis says, “He’s got abandonment issues. Can you blame him? Losing his owner all in a shock like that. Cats are sensitive.”

Monty leaps up onto the sofa and attempts to shred a cushion with his claws.

Hathaway says, “That cat is not sensitive. That cat has a vendetta.”

“I think he senses you’re nervous,” Lewis says, and removes the cat to the floor. Monty meows and hunches up, disgruntled. Lewis strokes him under his chin.

“I’m not nervous,” Hathaway says. “I’m apprehensive. Last time he tried to eat my books.”

“He’s trying to get to know you better! Shared interests.”

“You do know I don't literally subsist on books...?”

“Just keep him going,” Lewis says with a final air. “Give him some food, a little bit of kindness. Keep an eye out. Is that really so hard?”

* * *

**13.**

The cat spends several hours glowering in a corner.

“Suit yourself,” Hathaway tells it, and goes to read the Guardian on his laptop, but one of the front-page stories is the Crevecoeur case.

(Scarlett has got off easy; she might have been charged as an accomplice after the fact. Instead, she is charged with perverting the course of justice. Perhaps she can win the court over with her tears, with her tremulous and misguided love of her father. Paul, who is much less charming, faces a life sentence.)

Hathaway closes the laptop and lights a cigarette. He can feel the cat squinting at him: disapproving. “I’ll smoke if I want to,” he says. “No one asked you.”

But cigarette smoke is bad for animals. Another way to kill a cat. So he goes to the window and opens it to lean out, exhaling his toxic breath onto Highbury Street. A car honks. The rooftops are dark outside the pale of sunset, and the clouds are uncrisp in the way of summer clouds. “The houses are all gone under the sea,” Hathaway says— to no one. “The dancers are all gone under the hill.” Nightfall. O dark dark dark.

The cat comes to crouch next to him. It makes a sound like a car brake screeching and needles at his ankle with pinprick claws.

“Ow!” Hathaway says. “What was that for?”

It eyes him steadily and sinks its claws further in. Hathaway jerks away, and with some effort doesn’t kick it.

“Fine,” he says. “All right. You’ve made your point.”

He feeds it dinner out of a cat food tin, and it appears placated. It sits on the coffee table, licking its chops, while Hathaway reads a collection of Wittgenstein’s letters. The book doesn’t hold his interest. The cat too seems bored. It chooses to evidence this first by knocking a stack of case files off the table— they spill across the floor in a disordered fall— and then by heaving itself onto Hathaway’s knees and pushing at his book.

“I don’t know what you want,” Hathaway tells it. He tries stroking its head, but the cat bites his hand and leaps off him to go curl underneath the window. 

Hathaway sighs and drops his head back against the sofa. After a while he goes to the kitchen and pours himself a glass of whiskey.

* * *

**14.**

Night. Somewhere Paul is asleep, perhaps. In a cell? Has he been remanded into custody? If he’s been let out on bail, then where? What does he dream of? Happy days, as he remembers them? An easier era of being loved? The powerful hands that showed him a place and shoved and pushed and trimmed at him so he would never outgrow it, always be small, always be an ornament… ?

And Scarlett. What does she dream of? Unimaginable, maybe. Unless she too dreams of childhood’s long summer, damp days amongst William Kent’s pseudo-ruins, clambering over the roots of trees and brambles out in Wytham Woods. The long summer: for her, the long epithalamium, the long run of the fox before it’s caught. It’s a good dream. She too loved being a child. She can’t imagine someone who didn’t love it.

* * *

**15.**

Sometime in the night, Hathaway wakes with the air driven from his lungs. He struggles for a moment in the panicky grip of something, something, a fear, a shadow— till a bulky shape gives a sullen yowl and little claws sink into his chest.

The cat. The cat has leapt up on him. It is settling itself now, a heavy presence. It blinks at him— a reprimand— in the dark.

Hathaway sinks back on the sofa, exhaling softly. He starts to bring his hand up and stroke the creature, but at the last minute he stops.

The cat settles its head on its paws. Its tail curls around it.

“I’m going back to sleep,” Hathaway tells it. “—For your information.”

In the morning, when he wakes, the cat is a sleeping weight on him: a gently snoring, rumbling mass. Hathaway watches it curiously for a while without moving. Sunlight creeps across the floor, then gradually across his bare feet, the blanket.

The cat stretches and regards him lazily. Its rumble increases. Eventually it must grow bored, because it stands and steps quite deliberately on Hathaway’s face before leaping to the floor. It eyes Hathaway expectantly.

“I know,” Hathaway says. “It’s time for breakfast.”

The cat meows.

* * *

**16.**

On Saturday, the cat gets into a tin of shoe polish and tracks it halfway around the flat, drinks from Hathaway’s coffee cup when he leaves it on the counter, and makes a dash for the window while Hathaway is smoking. But he permits Hathaway to sleep in the bed that night, and merely curls at his feet with a contented growl.

Hathaway could kick him to the floor in his sleep. He could lash out and break the cat’s neck. The cat might move, and Hathaway might smother him. But he thinks the cat would probably bite him if he did, or at the very least kick up a racket. So he sleeps, and none of these things happen.

Lewis returns, and the cat exults in his presence. Hathaway watches from across the room with affected indifference. When Lewis asks, he says, “Nothing was laid waste this time, so— it was fine.”

“I suppose that’s an improvement,” Lewis says.

* * *

**17.**

Here is a story from Hathaway’s childhood: when he was age nine, he went through a period of drawing castles under siege. He was not a talented artist, but they were technically correct in all details. Some were based on castles he had seen when His Lordship had taken the children on jaunts around the country, sometimes as far as Monmouth or Brecon. Hathaway drew these castles barraged by stick figures in helmets, equipped with pikes and catapults and badly-drawn horses. No one was concerned by this obsession; little boys liked castles, and His Lordship was kind enough to indulge the fancy. Why should anyone find it strange that a nine-year-old boy wasn’t more interested in the actual warfare, in the mechanics and strategy, that his sole interest was in the reproduction of some very specific and visceral scene: the fortress hopelessly repelling invaders, hunched into itself futilely, as a superior force lays waste to its walls… ?

The interest passed. Perhaps Hathaway felt it was childish. Perhaps it _was_ childish, for a boy whose chief hobbies were translating Plutarch and playing Bach minuets. He discovered T.E. Lawrence and took up the art of brass rubbing. The area around Oxford was good ground for it. And though Hathaway couldn’t have guessed, it was good preparation — all those hours spent in out-of-the-way places, looking at the faces of the dead.

* * *

**18.**

In September, the case that Lewis and Hathaway are working involves a body found half-buried in Wheeland Stone Circle, the body— it turns out— of a fifteen-year-old boy. Strangled. The papers go on about ritual killings, but the reality is certain to be a more ordinary one, no matter how many batty psychics Hathaway must interview about mystic energies.

Hathaway is first on the scene when they find the second body. It’s early, just past dawn, and the air is clean— scoured. He shivers under the wool weight of his coat. The Wheeland stones look like bodies, or like they might have bodies in them if you chipped away the stone. They’re the right size and height. He touches one with a fingertip.

The body half-buried in the earth doesn’t really look like a body. It just looks like a child. A SOCO is leant over it, tipping the head back just enough to reveal the blue bruises in a ring round the neck. When released, the head drops forward: limp. A child is a coiled spring, tense with potential. Now there is nothing of this left.

“What if they want it to look like ritual murder,” Hathaway says to Lewis when they’re back at the office. “To distract us. What if they just needed a body to stage the scene? What if that’s all it was?”

Like an art supply.

“Let’s not rule anything out yet,” Lewis says. His phone rings, and he answers it, his eyes coming to rest on Hathaway as he listens. A pen tip-tip-tip-taps in his hand.

Hathaway hunches his shoulders and turns away.

“Yes,” Lewis says. “Yeah. Thanks for calling. Appreciate it.” He hangs up the phone. He doesn’t say anything for a minute or two. Tip-tap. Tip-tap. He’s sizing Hathaway up. The air in the room heavies. The animal in the corner seems to awaken, stretch.

“Go ahead,” Hathaway says, staring at his computer.

“What?”

“Whatever you’ve got to say. Just. Say it.” He can guess.

Lewis sighs. “The verdict is in. On the—“

Hathaway nods curtly. He continues to stare at his computer.

“Thought you might want to hear it from— well, not from the news.” Lewis pauses. “We could go for a pint, if you—“

“No.” Hathaway shook his head. “Tell me.”

“James—“

Hathaway looks at him.

Lewis rubs a hand over his eyes. “Two years for perverting the course of justice. And a thirty-eight-year minimum term for—“

“Thanks,” James says.

Another silence.

“Is it all right if I come over later?” Lewis asks.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Not for that. Just. I don’t know. Game of chess?”

“You hate chess.”

“Draughts, then. Snakes and Ladders?” Lewis is clearly aware of his own ridiculousness. His mouth turns up, wry, on one side.

Hathaway looks down at the crime scene photos spread out on his desk. Each standing stone casts a gnomon-like shadow. Too many: impossible to know what time it is. Death is every hour now. The dead boy is buried at the center of the circle. Strongly rooted in the earth. Antaeus, son of Poseidon, was almighty so long as he stood upon his mother land. From the skulls of his foes he built a temple to his father.

Don’t think of Paul playing barefoot in the ruins of Skenfrith Castle, catching a ladybird in his hands, so careful as it bumbled across his knuckles. He didn’t want to let it go in the end. He clambered atop one of the tumbledown walls and flung his arm out: “Goodbye, ladybird! Goodbye! Goodbye!” he said, but the insect clung to him a little bit longer, just a little bit longer, just a little—

Hathaway shuts his eyes. “Fine,” he says curtly. “I don’t own any games, though.”

“Right, then,” Lewis says. “I’ll have to bring some with me.”

* * *

**19.**

Lewis brings beer and whiskey and a pack of Happy Families cards. The families are all birds: fat penguins and geese and flamingos. Hathaway points out that penguins, geese, and flamingos don’t establish heteronormative households. Lewis suggests that if this is a problem, they can rename the game, and after some discussion a title is agreed: Happy Non-Heteronormative Bird Groups of Various Ages and Genders. They play several increasingly drunken rounds of Happy Non-Heteronormative Bird Groups of Various Ages and Genders. Neither of them has a strong grasp of the rules, and Hathaway argues when it seems like he’s going to lose, so most of the games end in a draw.

It’s an absurd scene: two rumpled coppers in their shirtsleeves, rather grim and terse to begin with, then more comfortable as the night goes on and liquor gets in them. Hathaway folds himself onto the sofa, gangly and loose-limbed, holding a glass against one thigh, his head tipped back.

“Did you ever feel like,” he says, eyeing the ceiling, “like you can’t do it anymore?”

“The work?” Lewis bows his head, perhaps concealing a small frown. “Not really, I suppose. Not seriously.”

“No. Course not. Your walls aren’t too thin. Big sturdy Northern walls. Hadrian’s Wall. Built to outlast empires.”

“Is that what you think? Lyn says I’m too soft-hearted. Taking Monty the cat in.”

Hathaway shakes his head. “Only people who’ve got strong walls can be soft-hearted.”

“Oh, yeah? How does that make sense?”

“Because.” Hathaway lets his head loll to one side. “I can’t imagine having children. What a total terror. Worrying about them all the time.”

Lewis shrugs. “It starts out that way, I suppose. They’re so little when they’re born. Like they’re part of your body, just— gotten loose. They get older, you realise they’ve got a will of their own. You’ve got to let them take care of themselves. They’re not part of you anymore.”

“Everything’s a part of me,” Hathaway says. “I can’t help it. Like the Picts. The barbarian invasions. _Into my heart an air that kills_.”

“Now I know you’ve had too much to drink. You’re getting poetic.”

“Mm.” Hathaway doesn’t deny it. He shuts his eyes, blond lashes feathering his cheeks. “You see why I have to be hard-hearted.”

Lewis takes the glass from his unresisting hand, gently. “I think you do a poor job of it,” he says, and touches Hathaway’s head: something between a brief pat and a benediction. “Though I suppose I can’t blame you. Get some sleep, now, will you?”

“I like your cat,” Hathaway says without opening his eyes. “Because he doesn’t like me.”

Lewis’s laugh rumbles. “I’ll bring him by for a visit.”

For a moment Hathaway might have fallen asleep. Then he says, “I know what you’re doing.”

“I’m sure you do. Clever clogs.” In fact, Lewis is tidying up the bottles, stacking the cards back into their deck.

“Thank you.” Hathaway peers at him, half-awake. “For— playing cards with me.”

“Any time,” Lewis says.

He makes Hathaway shed his shoes and trousers and coaxes him patiently into bed. He putters about in the kitchen for a little while after. When Hathaway awakens the next day, he will find paracetamol set next to a bottle of water atop a note with a smiling sun drawn at the top. The note says: _Good morning sun shine! Try eating something greasy it helps. Told Innocent you’d be in at noon. Take care of yourself. —Robbie_

He will smile despite himself, and be surprised when he keeps smiling.

* * *

**20.**

The boys in the stone circle are called Martin Spence and Adam Dalgridge. They had probably never met one another. One was from Cowley, a lackluster student at a local comprehensive who liked electronic music and skateboards. The other was a gifted young poet from Birmingham who was doing a summer study at Lonsdale College. Their only unifying factor was death: the desperate hands of an advertising executive who’d strangled Martin Spence to make him stop laughing at his clumsy sexual advance, and who’d then killed again once the tabloids started writing, thinking to divert attention away from him. He isn’t a ruthless killer, this executive; he’s a snivelling bastard. When they’ve got him in interrogation, he keeps talking about how beautiful Martin Spence was. He’s crying, tears dripping down his face. After a while Hathaway leaves the room.

He goes out to Freobury that evening; leaves his car by the side of the farm road off the A3400 and hikes through the tall grass out to the hill. It’s no longer a scene of crime. It’s just a stone circle. It’s been there for who knows how many thousands of years. It’s seen so many deaths, it should be indifferent. Probably people were sacrificed here— their throats were cut, or else they were strangled like Martin Spence and Adam Dalgridge. That was what had happened to the bodies in the bogs, the ones that came out after millennia so intact that it was still possible to tell how they had suffered. Their broken limbs. The ropes around their necks. 

Hathaway stands in the centre of the circle for a long time, squinting out to where the sun has set beyond the ridge. He breathes in the autumn air slowly. Time doesn’t really seem to pass. When the impulse comes, he lies down on the hard ground. Dampness seeps through his heavy wool coat. The back of his neck is cold where the hair is short. He twists his fingers into the grass and holds on, as though afraid he is going to be swept off.  Through the earth he is connected to the dead of all ages, the known dead and the forgotten dead, the dead with their secrets, the dead not yet found. They are all in this together. The burden passes. The task of keeping each other alive. An inheritance.

* * *

**21.**

Lewis keeps coming over, more often than not. Maybe he just can’t figure out a point at which to stop. It’s not like the thing ends when Paul goes to prison, or Scarlett, or— any of them. Hathaway broaches the subject— he says, “You know, you don’t need to—“ But Lewis just shrugs and says, “Course I don’t,” and three night’s later he’s back with a DVD of “English Cricket’s Greatest Ever Matches,” determined to teach Hathaway about the game.

“You should come over to mine,” Lewis says at the end of that evening. “Been meaning to break the kitchen in. You can cook something and catch up with Monty.”

Hathaway says, “It seems like I do all the work in this scenario.”

But come Saturday afternoon, he’s there: roasting aubergines and making a lemon-yoghurt sauce. The telly’s a low hum in the background, and he’s had a bit of red wine. Monty keeps weaving around his feet, hoping for a bit of yoghurt when Hathaway’s not looking. “Gluttony is your tragic flaw,” Hathaway tells him.

He covers the sauce with clingfilm and sticks it in the fridge to chill; in a surprise attack, he scoops up Monty, taking ten disgruntled claws to the wrist, and deposits him on the sofa beside Lewis.

“What’s this?” Lewis says. “You kids not getting along?”

“He lacks the spiritual discipline to withstand temptation.” Hathaway scratches the cat’s head. “Can’t turn my back when he’s around. Dinner should be ready in about ten minutes.”

“All right. I’ll keep him here till then.” Lewis’s arm curls around the cat, who tolerates this affection, his eyes going to little green slits.

Hathaway watches them for a moment, head cocked to the side, like a man who is studying some new skill, who hopes to acquire it, hasn’t yet, but someday, someday…

He goes back to the kitchen after a while. The aubergines are nicely blackening. The rest of the bottle of wine is breathing on the counter. The air smells crisp and herbal and enticing. Hathaway starts to move the dishes into the sink, all the knives and bowls and plates, and in this brief moment when nothing needs doing, he starts, one by one, to wash them.

**Author's Note:**

> There are relatively few references and quotations here: the requisite A.E. Housman ("Into my heart an air that kills") and T.S. Eliot's "East Coker" ("The houses are all gone under the sea./ The dancers are all gone under the hill./ O dark dark dark.") are both represented.
> 
> I'm on [Tumblr](http://septembriseur.tumblr.com).


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